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The idea of punch card programming blows my mind.
He's not talking about punch card programming, that's way more advanced and requires a Turing machine, what he's talking about is computers as the term was using before what you would think as a computer existed.
The example in the video is for the computer on a cannon in a battleship. If there wasn't a computer you would need to adjust the angle and height of the cannon, but that's not something a human can know, what humans can know is angle to the ship and the distance to it, so instead you put two inputs where a human inputs that and you translate that into angle/height. Now those two would be very straightforward, essentially you just rename the height crank to distance. But this computer is a lot more complex, because wind, speed, etc can affect the shoot, so you have cranks for all of that, and internally they combine into a final output of angle/height to the cannon.
That's cool, but punch card programming blows my mind.